KUOPIO, FINLAND – Walking through a cavernous sports hall, the threat of a third World War feels vanishingly small. But, besides hosting children’s parties and dance classes, this building has a chilling purpose: it is ready to be transformed into a nuclear bomb shelter at a moment’s notice.
The Luola Sports and Event Centre – “luola” means “cave” in Finnish – is carved into rock face in Kuopio, a city just 100 miles from the Russian border. Its vast 13,780 metre-squared footprint houses a volleyball court, dance and martial arts studios, and gyms, as well as storage rooms containing helmets, gas masks and iodine tablets to combat radiation poisoning.
In 72 hours, Luola converts from a public sports facility to an airtight bunker that can protect nearly 7,000 people from missile, chemical and nuclear threats, as well as natural disasters.
Luola is protected by between 20 and 40 metres of rock above, blast walls, maze-like corridors and layered doors, and a complex air filtration system to protect against outside toxins. Each person is allocated 0.75 square metres of space, sleeping on fold-out triple bunk beds and using toilets which are effectively plastic buckets.
It opened two years ago, having cost around €50m (£43m). Those living close by purchase their shelter space when they buy their apartment, at a one-time cost of approximately €1,150 (£997) per person.
The rock had originally been carved out to make a military workshop for building and testing rifles, but had been left abandoned until the city purchased it, excavated further and developed the sports facility.
Luola’s Sports Centre also houses storage rooms containing helmets, gas masks and iodine tablets (Photo: City of Kuopio)Luola is one of more than 50,000 civil defence shelters across Finland. Most are small and built underneath residential buildings – Finnish developers are usually required to construct a bomb shelter for any building over 1,250 square metres in size – but there are around 100 large-scale sites like Luola across the country. The city of Kuopio alone has six.
In total, around 4.8 million people of Finland’s 5.5 million-strong population have access to a bomb shelter. Those who don’t are largely based in the countryside. Some shelters have pools, ice hockey rinks, even saunas, explains Colonel Asko Muhonen, a Kuopio resident who, having retired from the military, now advises the city’s leadership.
An architect’s drawing of the Kuopio Luola Sports and Events Centre (Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo/archdaily.com)“Even though you don’t feel that you are in the cave now, we are really inside the rock bed,” he says. “The space for each person is very limited but you are protected, and this place is very, very secure.”
Should an alert be sent out to take shelter, residents will be told to bring some drinking water, medicine, food and perhaps a sleeping bag. This level of preparation isn’t a shock for Finns; the country takes a whole-society approach to defence, with all Finnish men completing conscription before their 30th birthday, volunteer organisations working closely with the Government to protect key organs of society, and members of the public encouraged to keep a stock of emergency supplies in their homes.
Luola is carved deep into a rock face and uses a base originally intended for building and testing military weapons (Photo: City of Kuopio)“The Finnish system is partly mental,” says Col Muhonen. “We learn it through our mother’s milk. This kind of preparedness has been going on for seven generations.”
With the growing threat from Russia, countries including the UK are reassessing their own preparedness for conflict.
It is not clear how many potential shelters there are in the UK. Unlike in Finland, which maintained its shelters after the Cold War and has built many more since, some of the UK’s former nuclear bunkers have been made into tourist attractions or hotels.
Luola is regularly visited by country representatives seeking to learn about its approach – the British embassy among them.
Colonel Asko Muhonen said the Finnish approach to preparedness is psychological as well as physical (Photo: Molly Blackall)“In the past year, we have had a lot of visitors because this shelter is maybe the most modern dual-use shelter in Europe – maybe even the world,” Colonel Muhonen said. “The security situation is unfortunately worse at the moment, so the idea – especially this dual-use system – is something which is obviously very interesting.”
Lord Toby Harris, chair of the UK’s National Preparedness Commission, says he hopes that local authorities would have a “good idea” of what spaces could be opened up for use in emergencies, such as possible shelters for those being temporarily evacuated to provide warmth in cold weather or respite in extreme hot weather.
However, Lord Harris said that these were unlikely to be below ground or bomb-proof except in rare cases. “The UK should do more and dual-use obviously makes sense,” he says.
Luola is designed to be part of the city’s infrastructure even when not being used for protection, and hosts sports matches, school gym classes, martial arts lessons and cultural events (Photo: City of Kuopio)To avoid tipping off Russia, emergency planners remain tight-lipped about shelter details. However, they are understood to see that the UK’s geographical position being so much farther away from Russia than Finland means bomb shelters like these might not be what the country needs.
A government spokesperson said that national security is its “first duty” and it maintains “well-rehearsed contingency plans for a range of risks, developed and refined over many years”.
Proponents of the dual-use model say it could be key to success elsewhere, by providing both a shelter from potential attacks and a community asset.
Whether the British public would ever tolerate multimillion-pound spending on a bomb shelter is one thing. However, polls indicate Britons are becoming increasingly aware of the Russian threat and supportive of increasing defence spending.
But as the spat over defence spending, which led to the resignation of defence secretary John Healey, rattles on, the question of whether the Treasury would ever fund it is another matter entirely.
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